“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” billionaire Jeff Greene said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum Forum in Davos, Switzerland. (AFP/Getty Images)

It’s good to know that a fabulously wealthy fellow who built his fortune betting against subprime mortgage securities is thinking about the rest of us.

“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” billionaire Jeff Greene said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as reported by Bloomberg. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”

A smaller, better existence with less things and lowered expectations? Hmm. Surely Greene lives by his own credo and has downsized his own lifestyle first.

Or maybe not.

As the Bloomberg reporter cruelly noted, Greene, who lives in Palm Beach, “flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week.”

The materialism of modern consumer culture is fair game for critique, but it does take amazing gall to trumpet the virtues of a “smaller” existence while practicing wholesale extravagance. The American hope that each generation can be better off than the last is healthy, not selfish — especially among those of us who don’t yet own our own jet plane.

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